


No Regrets in Hell

by ninjamonkey73



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Year of Hell Part 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22298323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninjamonkey73/pseuds/ninjamonkey73
Summary: A watch. A down-right poetic gesture on his part. Time. He had already given her so much time. As much as she needed. And she took and took and gave back so little to earn his devotion and friendship.
Relationships: Janeway/Chakotay
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	No Regrets in Hell

**Author's Note:**

> Written November 1997.
> 
> What follows is an episode addition for The Year of Hell: Part 1. I hadn’t intended to write one at first, but one scene kept haunting me and I had to work it out, since I knew Part 2 wasn’t very likely to do so.

The Year of Hell: Day 65

Kathryn stood slowly, cursing herself- first, for sitting hunched over the disabled bridge panel for so long and second, for her essentially curt dismissal of Chakotay when he had tried to bring some semblance of normality back to their lives. Her birthday. Another year. As she stretched the stiffness out of her aching joints and rubbed at her temples, she wondered at her ability to keep everyone at arms length. Especially him. The gesture was inspired; certainly, under any other circumstances she would have cherished the chronometer for what it represented- hope, and time.

No matter how bad things seemed, Chakotay was always there giving her whatever he could of what she needed. Whatever she allowed might be a more accurate representation, but either way she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had done wrong by him this time. It had taken the last of her will to not look at him after she forced the chronometer back into his hand. Her peripheral vision had been enough. She could see well enough the way he had risen and slipped away, dejected. And all because of her.

A small piece of twisted bulkhead occupied the Captain’s chair. Kathryn reached down and carefully removed it, turning it over slowly in her hands. She could no longer decipher from whence it had come- a part of the ceiling, a wall, a panel. The point was moot now anyway. Her ship was only held together by sheer will and immeasurable perseverance on the part of her broken and battered crew. Tears threatening to close her throat, Kathryn swallowed hard and tossed the scrap to the deck, allowing herself to sink down into the command chair. Holding her head in her hands and resting her elbows on her knees, she thought about her options. Chakotay had suggested splitting up and although she fully intended to stay onboard Voyager until the bitter end, could she demand that her crew do the same?

So long as Voyager could maintain its crew, she would fight for them to remain the family unit they had become. The fight for home was no longer a linear struggle toward a section of space called home, but a cyclical struggle to maintain the very walls that had by necessity become their home. Kathryn rubbed her eyes and laughed softly to herself as she realized she had been dreaming of home, but had been envisioning Voyager as it was before they encountered the Krenim. Sitting back in the chair, she closed her eyes and tried to visualize an unbroken bridge surrounding her. Of course, that image inevitably brought with it the image of her First Officer, when he too had been unbroken.

A watch. A down-right poetic gesture on his part. Time. He had already given her so much time. As much as she needed. And she took and took and gave back so little to earn his devotion and friendship. Another year older and he wanted to give her more time. She knew she was going way beyond the probable intent of the gift, and yet the parallel went so far beyond Cray and his battered vessel. A few planks and half a sail would be almost an improvement. As it stood, Voyager was less spaceworthy than Cray’s had been seaworthy.

“But he got his crew home,” Chakotay had said. She could hear the hopefulness in his voice, could just about hear the reassuring grin she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge. How had she managed to be so dismissive in so few words? Practicality always won out for her in moments of increased stress. A meal, a hypospray, a pair of boots, but what about a monumental gesture of hopefulness, support, understanding? He knew their situation just as well as she did. He knew perhaps even better than she about the status of their supplies and resources. He was reaching out to her and she was pushing him back in the name of practicality.

Just as it was impractical to allow such a frivolous object to supersede their more basic needs, it was also impractical to acknowledge the passing of a birthday in the midst of such a crisis, even more so to allow herself to step away from her necessary task of holding her ship and crew together. To allow Chakotay in would mean having to lower the brave front she had to maintain. They needed her to keep them together. They all needed her.

And what exactly did she need? Kathryn Janeway stood and surveyed her bridge with the detached, unseeing eye of one who has lived too long in the chaos that surrounds her. She needed to get off of the bridge, first and foremost. Unable to recall the last time she had taken a break from the constant repairs, she headed for the aft Jefferies tube and her arduous trek back to her quarters. The turbolifts had been operational all of four days before the EPS conduits on deck 11 had blown again. This time the damage seemed just about irreparable. Only one route to and from the bridge remained in tact. It allowed only one way traffic and was just one more thing to add to the exhaustion of her crew. All she could do was thank the powers that be that they still *had* a route to the bridge.

Kathryn caught herself wishing the holodecks were still operational. She marveled at how she could justify such a nonessential use of their waning power for the sake of her sanity, and yet Chakotay had been wrong to merely suggest not recycling his gift for her. It all came back to him and his damn gift. They were in the very center of the worst possible scenario and he had remembered her birthday. Which angered her more, Kathryn wondered as she hopped off of the ladder two steps before the bottom, that he could still reach out in such a situation or that she didn’t dare?

Jefferies tube junction 15 in section 8 was just like nearly every other junction on her ship- a ladder leading up a deck, a hatch to go down, and two sets of doors opening onto horizontal tubes. To the left of the ladder, the door that led toward the remaining crew quarters had been braced open several days ago. She could no longer remember how many times she had been through this particular junction since the first time the lifts failed, but she knew she would see it hundreds more times before they could get the ship operational again- if ever at all. She began to crawl into the tube and stopped, stepping back out into the junction and turning around slowly. Something was different. The other door was open. In that direction, Kathryn recalled, you could travel only one junction more before a transverse bulkhead separated you from a gaping hole in Voyager’s hull.

Janeway poked her head into the passageway and listened for a moment, trying to decide if a work crew had been rerouted without her knowledge. Certainly, the list of pressing repairs did not include anything down this limited conduit. She could hear faint noises ahead and decided to investigate. As she got closer to the sounds, she began to make them out. The soft rustle of fabric as someone paced back and forth, the occasional thump of flesh on metal as he or she struck a bulkhead, presumably in frustration. A short distance from the hatch, Janeway caught sight of a pant leg as it passed the doors. Regulation Starfleet issue- it could be anyone, but at least it was definitely one of her own. She knew it would not be long before the Krenim managed to breach Voyager’s last defenses to finish the job they were so intent on completing. Her head down to avoid laying a hand or knee down on a razor-like fragment of her vessel, Janeway emerged from the hatch and began speaking before she established to whom she was speaking.

“This section is off-limits. What do you think you’re...” Kathryn stopped as her eyes met Chakotay’s. The anguish she could plainly read on his features brought the tears back to clench her throat the instant their eyes locked. She managed to force out, “Chakotay.”

Caught entirely off guard by his presence and unsure of how to ease his distress, she reached out and put a hand on his chest, trying to force a smile through the knot in her throat. Chakotay immediately backed away from her touch and stalked to the far side of the junction.

“Have you come to make sure I recycled the chronometer, Captain?” Chakotay spat the words at the wall before him and cringed as he heard them hang in the air around him. Needing desperately to find his center, he took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully as he pressed his palms against the bulkhead in front of him. He jumped when he felt her place a hand on his left shoulder. “Kathryn.”

Chakotay had barely breathed it, and yet she had heard it clearly enough. For once she felt comforted by the emotion behind his intoning of her name and found herself leaning against his back at his left shoulder at the same moment she realized the tears were not going to remain within her control. Giving in to the torrent of emotion she had been struggling to rein in for nearly 65 days, Kathryn slid her arms tentatively around Chakotay’s midsection, latching herself onto his back as the first of the sobs tore through her.

She hated feeling exposed, needy, but she disliked her other options even more. She would surely lose her mind if she insisted on shutting herself off from the crew. From her friends. From *him*. There had to be a safe balance she could strike, a healthy level of openness and communication that wouldn’t compromise the command structure. Most certainly, however, this wasn’t it. Swallowing back the tears that still burned her eyes, Kathryn cleared her throat and stepped back from Chakotay. “I apologize, Commander.”

Chakotay turned to face her, the anguish gone from his eyes, replaced by a concerned, searching look that troubled her more. He placed his hands on her shoulders and squeezed gently, sliding them down her arms to grasp her hands as he spoke softly. “Let me help you, Kathryn. Please don’t shut me out.”

Staring at their linked hands, Kathryn silently debated how far in was safe to allow him. If their predicament didn’t improve in the very near future, it would no longer matter how far she let him in on her emotional state; they’d be dead or separated before long. Steeling herself with a slow, deep breath, she raised her eyes to meet his. “I can’t do it, Chakotay. I can’t keep my promise to these people. I swore I’d see them all home, that we would stay together no matter what, but our ship is on its last legs. A few more battles like yesterday and we won’t have any more repairs to worry about. We won’t have a ship.”

“Is there anything left to do that we haven’t already tried?” Chakotay gestured for Kathryn to sit and settled himself down cross-legged in front of her. “You’ve done everything you could, Kathryn. *We’ve* done everything we could. No one blames you for this except you. Sometimes we have to just accept that things are beyond our ability to control.”

Kathryn studied her hands in her lap. “It’s just so unfair. I mean, we overcame our crews’ differences, we rallied together for the tremendous journey ahead of us, we managed to beat Species 8472 at their own game and get ourselves beyond the Borg’s territory, only to be crushed by a race whose one crowning achievement is a torpedo that’s in a state of temporal flux.” Jumping to her feet as her voice rose in agitation, Kathryn began to pace across the small junction. “And they aren’t even all that savvy in the tactical department. If we could just manage to shield ourselves from those damn torpedoes, they’d be ours in short order.”

Chakotay stood to bar her way, reaching out to delicately trace his thumb across her cheekbone. “No matter how it turns out, we’re together. There was a time not too long ago when I wasn’t so sure we could stay together. Now it’s the one reassurance I’m clinging to.”

Leaning into his touch, she placed her hand on his as he continued to run his thumb slowly back and forth on her cheek. A smile crept up to light her features, unbidden, and she vaguely noted that the space between them had shrunk to nearly nothing. Aside from their hands on her cheek, they were not in actual physical contact, however, she could feel the heat radiating off of him in the numerous places where they nearly touched. It was intoxicating and she was far too weary to fight her urge to close the remaining millimeters. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Kathryn could hear her voice of reason trying to have its say, as she pressed against Chakotay’s broad chest and slid her free hand around his back.

As she brushed her lips ever-so-lightly across his, she whispered, “One of us ought to put a stop to this before we do something we’ll regret.”

“I could never regret it. If you think you will, you had better tell me now. I only want to ease things for you, Kathryn, not complicate them. If you still aren’t ready for us, now’s the time to let me know.” Chakotay kissed her more fully, tempering his passion as best he could.

“Oh, Chakotay, I-”

Torpedo fire rocked Voyager before she could finish. Signaling that he should take the lead down the Jefferies tube, Kathryn followed, calling for a report. As they made their way to the bridge, she tried to keep her eyes focused on the deck and not on the man in front of her. She would certainly have a lot to face up to if they came out of this battle alive. It was definitely something to look forward to...


End file.
